Of course. And I’ll continue to do so as long as advertisement is detrimental to my online experience. If it wastes my time by forcing me to watch an ad before a video, if it distracts me from reading a text because of animations, if it tries to scam or shock me, I’m better off blocking it. I’m not against advertisement as communication that a useful product or service exists, I’m against advertisement abuse and greed.

I’ll happily pay for, donate to, or otherwise support services important to me that need and deserve it.

“If you don’t pledge fealty to your feudal Lord, you don’t care about the artists for which he is patron.”

I don’t care about creators who demand that I surrender my privacy as the only valid show of support for them.

As the de facto IT guy for my family, I block ads on all their computers just as a basic safety measure.

I can usually spot a fake download button and avoid scammy sites, but my parents and grandparents seem magnetically attracted to them

Adblockers are absolutely necessary because ads are a malware threat, never mind the scams and invasive popups. The cReAtOrS didn’t care enough to ensure advertisements were safe, legitimate, or not horribly obnoxious so they did it to themselves.

I used to allow ads for certain sites but after malware attempts and scam ads, I block them across the board. If that upsets anybody, go whine to the shady advertises who made this a necessity to browse the web safely.

Counter point: Any creator blindly putting random ad networks on their site doesn’t care about their users. Every ad should be vetted and served by the creator, those kinda ads are impossible to mass-block. If an ad swindles a user, it should be the creators reputation thats at stake.

I stopped having a bad conscience for blocking when one blog who begged promised to not autoplay any audio. The very next day it of course showed a very loud ad, and the creator excused it with “he didn’t have any control over what the advertisement network showed”.

If you, as a creator, choose to use advertising to monetize your content you don’t respect the limited lifetime of the people consuming your content or their security or about the way the marketing and advertising industry is destroying our society, such as (not exhaustive, just off the top of my head right now)

• building a surveillance economy, destroying privacy in the process
• manipulating people into voting in certain ways that are harmful to them and others
• protecting harmful products from scrutiny (e.g. tobacco, alcohol, products with too much sugar or fat or low quality ingredients, the car and oil industries, corporate climate change denial,…)
• encouraging overconsumption both in terms of quantity and in terms of items or services they don’t really need
• destroying content platforms with their mantra “not advertiser friendly”, leading to dystopian self-censorship on e.g. Youtube

And then there is the way internet advertising can spread malware and compromise the security of websites in general.

If you do want to monetize content in other ways there are models such as subscriptions or Patreon-style that are a lot more respectful of the user.

I use AdBlock (and SponsorBlock on YouTube, and a cookie whitelist and a JavaScript whitelist) because only I decide what to see on my screen.

I have been with this idea for a very long time. But over time all the platforms got more and more greedy and I had the feeling that my privacy got more and more invaded.

Since that time, I have an Adblock and use DDG.

Sorry content creators.

I do everything under the sun pretty much. Ublock origin, NoScript, chameleon extensions on Librewolf (and others). I “subscribe” to YouTube channels via rss feeds. Open up the newsboat feed reader from my terminal and an extension called “Alter” redirects me to an invidious instance. NoScript blocks everything pretty much as I just need the url. Then I use yt-dlp with the sponsorblock flag.

I only visit YouTube when I have a bunch of new “subs” that I found through word of mouth (reading blogs, HN, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc). I could just use invidious rss feeds, but if the instance goes down I would have to start all over again. There are other ways of achieving this same effect, but this is how I choose to consume yt now.

• I don’t like getting bombarded with ads.
• It hides scam ads.
• If the creator of something makes something I like I prefer to directly donate to them instead of giving up my privacy, and letting a company like google profit of it, and then they only give a small portion to the creator.

I’m not a hardcore capitalist. Also i can’t watch all the ads the corporations would like to feed me every day. So i’m fine with using an adblocker. Don’t give stuff out for free on the internet if you don’t like this. But since you ask: I really don’t like that strategy to commercialize everything, to finance everything by selling ads and user data…

I own my computer, and I control what is displayed on it. I can do anything I want to control what is and isn’t on my screen. It is not my problem if the majority of content is reliant on an ineffective monetization method.

I do wish someone would make an ad block that faked impressions. But it would probably lose the advantages of fast load times, security etc.

I use adblock because it makes the internet usable. There’s just so much crap shoved in your face these days. Not just ads that are blocked, but sponsored search results and SEO crap that you have to use your time and energy to filter out. I don’t know how anybody actually buys stuff or responds to internet ads. I’m more and more on the Dead Internet Theory bandwagon.

Yes, because most sites are completely unreadable without it. I also don’t want to be loading megabytes of garbage with all the ads, trackers, and whatever other shit people stick on commercial websites nowadays.